This invention relates generally to controlling television receivers and particularly to selecting channels for viewing.
Program guides may be offered on a variety of Internet web sites. These program guides include a grid displaying a series of time listings and various networks or channel listings. A user selecting a particular time can determine what programs are available on various channels.
A set-top box provides a television receiver coupled to a processor-based system. The processor-based system may sit on top of the television receiver. The set-top box operates with an electronic programming guide that may be provided by a service provider. Those electronic programming guides allow the user, through mouse click type operations, to select various programs for viewing.
However, the development, for each locality, of the electronic program guide by the service provider involves a considerable amount of effort. Moreover, the service provider must continually provide new programming guides by accessing the information from the content providers such as the television networks.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to use the already existent program guides available on the Internet to automatically select a particular program for viewing. There is generally no way to utilize the information contained in the hypertext mark-up language (HTML) document in a web based programming guide to actuate a separate application, such as a tuner application, on a processor-based system controlling a television receiver. Thus, while the channel and time information is present on the Internet, there is no way to provide the information in the HTML format to an application, that automatically tunes television programs for viewing.
Thus, there is a need for a way to use Internet-based television program guides to control channel and program selection on processor-based systems.